The Wall

The final hang

We have a gallery in town that has a new show every month. A lot of it is glass, as the gallery owner is a stained glass artist. 

In november, he had a show with an artist, Trebs Thompson, who worked with glass, but also with all sorts of found objects. I really loved her work, but the piece that my husband and I liked best got sold at the opening before we could make an offer on it.

At the opening, the artist asked for us to bring odds and ends to contribute to the making of a new piece, which would be raffled off to make money for the local glass guild. Everybody brought goodies - bottles and jewelry and little plastic things and Christmas ornaments - and she took them with her until the second reception, where the peace was unveiled. 

I really liked it, although not as much as the first piece. I had a vision of where the first piece would go, you see; it was also portrait and not landscape, so I know exactly where it would fit. Something horizontal would require an entire rehang of the living room wall and I wasn't up for that. 

Wall designed in photo editor

I tried to buy raffle tickets that night, but they didn't take credit or venmo and I didn't have cash. I popped back in the day of the raffle pick, bought a ticket, and watched as the gallery owner dumped all the tickets out and put them in a big bowl for later. 

I might have been the last ticket, but I won. 

Thus necessitating an entire rehang of the living room wall. I took everything down at the beginning of the holiday break, because my husband is home for 2 weeks and would have time to put in the bolts required to hang the piece (the art wall is also the brick firewall, and almost impermeable). 

He went back to work on January 5th, and the wall was still untouched. He continued that way until I threatened to bring a friend over with a bigger drill, and then it happened. 

After that piece went up, I was able to rehang everything else I wanted to add to the wall, because in those two weeks of impatience, I photographed everything, including the bare wall, and put it all together in my photo editing program so that I knew where everything was going to go. 

Obviously I love a busy wall. I'm really happy with this, and the pops of red are much more consistently colored in person, rather than in the photo.

I won!

I leave you with a close up of the raffle piece. The vintage jewelry flowers at the bottom make me so happy. The sun at the top is an exploded glass Christmas ornament. 

We know I like to upcycle, but this is extreme even for me. I love it.